(CNN)In the 1990s Marlon Brando made a prediction: he believed that in the future actors would become obsolete, replaced with digital avatars.

"Actors aren't going to be real, they're going to be inside a computer -- you watch, it's going to happen," he argued. "Maybe this is the swansong for all of us."

Digitized and reconstituted, Brando imagined actors would have a voice and life beyond themselves. He even had his head scanned and mapped onto a computer at one point by friend and visual effects pioneer Scott Billups, recording facial expressions so as to be replicated in the digital age.